Thursday, November 12, 2009

Is spam getting smarter?

I don't trust anyone. It's awful. If a stranger on the street says 'hello', I immediately assume they're going to abduct me, steal my identity or ask me for money.

This impeccable judgement of mine was clouded when I received an email about my blog. It was very professional and well-written (no ridiculous grammar or punctuation), addressed to me, and even name-checked the title of a recent blog post in the body of the email. They said all the right things, like that I had a great writing style, and my blog was witty (flattery, btw, will get you everywhere).

The email was about the "gifted web writers" association. And they wanted to pay me to write! To a girl who hates her job and would give her left breast to write for a living, It was like a dream come true! I could write in my own voice, about product and other fun stuff.

"Click on it!" my work-hating, dreamy side of my brain urged.

"What the hell's the matter with you?" my realistic half answered.

Instead of clicking, I googled them, and a website came up. I clicked on the Google link and up came a semi-respectable looking page, that was, of course, "under construction". Clicking on the "contact us" buttom brought me to another page. With a name and address.

In israel.

Anyone else ever get something like this???

Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

1 comment:

Lori Whitwam said...

No, but I've had a rash of spam comments lately, both on Fermented Fur and our work blog. It hasn't hit on Writecrastination. It is for way old posts and says something like "I found your blog with (an html code for Google, supposedly, is inserted. I didn't click but suspect it does not go to Google.) and like it very much..." The English isn't quite right. And then it says "sorry for offtopic." I've also had a bunch that are just ten or fifteen links for various words of a Viagra-type nature. Of course I delete them all.